Author: Pat Flynn

Pat Flynn: Podcasts. Isn’t it weird how, when you really think about what’s happening right now, you’re listening to a recording of me in my dirty home office—dirty because there’s a lot of . . . I just didn’t have time. You’re listening to this at some point in the future, and it kind of feels like we’re speaking to each other right now. I might even be able to call out exactly where you are. Like on a drive right now, or maybe you’re on a walk, maybe you just woke up and this is the first thing you turned on in the morning, or maybe you’re out working out and get stuff done, washing the dishes—that’s when I listen to podcasts. It doesn’t really matter where you’re at. First of all, I just want to say thank you for listening. But second of all, I just want you […]

Discover three ways my podcast makes money and how you can too, including affiliate marketing, promoting your own product, and podcast advertising. Pat Flynn March 18, 2019 In this income report, I going to take you “behind the microphone” and share three different ways my podcast helps me make more money, and exactly where it all comes from. I’ve been talking a lot about advanced podcasting strategies lately, and if you missed my video interviews featuring several different podcasters and how they’re each using their podcast to support their business, click here to watch and discover new ways to promote your business with your podcast. Generating an income with your podcast is 100 percent possible, and you don’t have to rely just on advertisements and sponsorships. In fact, especially if you have a smaller audience, you have way more opportunity elsewhere to generate more income than you would with advertising. […]

Christy Wright: So here’s what’s interesting, and this is research-based, this is not just my experience alone. But I think we can all agree men and women, in general, are wired differently. And women, generally, are very, very relational. So we value ourselves by our relationships, as a mother, as a sister, as a daughter, as a friend, as a wife, and so on. Well this is great in business, because we are amazing at customer service. You don’t have to tell a woman how to take care of people, because that’s what she does, that’s who she is. It’s like telling a fish to swim, like this is who we are. However, being wired relationally tends to pose some challenges when relationships are at play in business. For example, pricing . . . Pat Flynn: You’re listening to Christy Wright, a good friend of mine from Business Boutique. Business […]

In this post, ten podcasters who grew their business on top of their show share how they did it, from podcast ROI to podcast Kickstarters and more! Pat Flynn March 11, 2019 Podcasting isn’t just a hobby for people anymore. For many, it’s about business growth and profit. In this post, I’m going to share several examples of how different people have used their new podcast to either grow an existing business or start a brand new one. When I started podcasting in 2010, I wasn’t ready for the kind of positive results it would have for my brand. It didn’t happen overnight, but relatively quickly, my podcast began helping me extend my reach, increase my authority, and grow my income. In a survey I conducted in 2012, for example, I learned that the Smart Passive Income Podcast was the #1 way my audience discovered me, ahead of links on […]

Pat Flynn: Hey. If email marketing is important to you, if making more sales is important to you, if providing a better customer experience before they become a customer and after they become a customer is important to you, then I would make sure you really pay attention to this episode. Today, I invited Brennan Dunn from RightMessage.com on the show. And RightMessage is probably one of the most mind-blowing tools that I’ve been able to use in my business over the last year. We’ve been experimenting with it and really playing with it over the past six to eight months. And it is about time to let you know about it, if you don’t know about it already, because it’s a game changer. A game changer. [Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through this link.] So what we’re gonna talk about today, is onsite […]

Pat Flynn: As a business owner or entrepreneur of any kind, anybody who is creating content on a regular basis, and then adding on top of that special projects such as creating courses or launches or coaching program, services, anything you might have to offer—one really important aspect of running the show or your business or your content is the planning and management of those things. That stems from just the ideation of how to do those things to the ongoing systems and requirements to continue to do those things very well and uphold the, hopefully, level of standard that you and your audience can enjoy. So today on the podcast I’m very, very thankful to bring on one of my team members with me to discuss how to plan and manage projects and programs. So coming up we have Janna Maron who is my Editorial Director, and she’s in […]

Dana Malstaff: So he sends me this article and it’s called “The Heroine’s Journey,” and it’s hilarious. I’ll see if I can find the link and send it to you. So it basically is, hey there’s the hero’s journey, well nobody talks about the heroine’s journey. Pat Flynn: I love this. Dana: “The Heroine’s Journey” is literally a woman that goes, “I’m sorry, what journey are we talking about? I have to feed the kids and take them to school and cook everybody dinner and make lunches and do the laundry. I don’t know what journey you’re talking on, but no one’s got time for a hero’s journey on this end.” So”The Heroine’s Journey” is, “I ain’t got time for a journey.” Pat: You’re listening to Dana Malstaff, the founder of Boss Mom who is our special guest today. She leads an amazing, engaged and very large community of moms over […]

In a new Campaign Income Report, learn how this game-changing tool helped me earn 6-figures: RightMessage, the ultimate tool in audience personalization! Pat Flynn February 18, 2019 Welcome to another campaign-based income report here on Smart Passive Income. This month, we’re going to examine a promotion I ran at the end of last year for Cyber Monday to promote my online courses. I’ve run small promotions during Cyber Monday before, but only for my architectural-related business. Why not anywhere else? Because I had no other products of my own to sell! Up until 2017, affiliate marketing had accounted for about 90 percent of my income, with podcast sponsorships, books, speaking, and niche sites making up the rest. Then, I finally created my own courses to better serve my audience, and have seen a significant increase in income ever since. There were a lot of lessons learned and many things that […]

Nick Stephenson: Evergreen runs on all our products all the time, but we will do a live promotion or a live launch once a year. So, for the main product, 10k Readers, we do an affiliate launch once every year and there’s a reason we do it once a year: It’s because it’s exhausting. It makes you want to just go to bed for a week. Pat Flynn: You’re listening to a conversation that I had recently with Nick Stephenson from YourFirst10kReaders.com, who’s also a former guest here on the show back in Episode 162, which was back in May of 2015. When he came on for the first time, he talked about his very first product launch, which was over $130,000. The fun story about Nick was that he was actually sitting in the audience on a webinar that I produced and co-hosted, that he then bought a course […]

Ready to crush it with email marketing in 2019? Email marketing is as crucial to online business as ever—here are my top five tips for success! Pat Flynn February 11, 2019 Email marketing isn’t dead. In fact, it’s very much alive and well. It’s still working really well for SPI—and it can do the same for you in 2019. I’m not the only one who feels this way—check out this tweet from David Heinemeier Hansson (also known as DHH), one of the founders of Basecamp and the inventor of Ruby on Rails: Email is the next big thing. We’re finally realizing just how precious these open standards were all along. Your way around Facebook, and all the other walled-garden parasites, goes through email. https://t.co/mHnLlnFKdm — DHH (@dhh) January 20, 2019 In 2018, email marketing played a huge part in helping us drive more than $1.5 million sales in online courses, […]

Emma Chapman: You should tell him. We just hit a milestone early today. Trey George: Oh yeah. Literally. Pat Flynn: What’s the milestone? Trey: We just hit 10 million installs on A Color Story. Pat: Are you serious, 10 million? Trey: Yeah, today. Pat: 10 million installs. Emma: Today. So we’re going to go get lunch after this. Pat: Oh my gosh, congratulations. I have so many questions about this. Trey: Thank you very much. Pat: First of all, that’s wonderful . . . This is part of a conversation that I just had with Emma and Trey, a wife and husband team who had built an app that is one of their many, many, many different things that they have in their portfolio of income streams in their business. This app in particular is called A Color Story, just hit 10 million installs. As you can tell, I’m a […]

How a common pain point led us deep into the physical product world, from designs and prototypes to a KickStarter launch and everything in between. Pat Flynn February 4, 2019 “There’s got to be a better way.” This is what my videographer Caleb Wojcik and I said to each other 15 months ago—almost in unison—as we observed video creators of all types walking around the VidSummit event in Los Angeles. That thought immediately turned into an idea, which then turned into some drawings, which turned into prototypes, which turned into what is now a new hardware brand that just released its first physical product into the world on Kickstarter last week. Meet the SwitchPod, the first tripod invented specifically for vloggers. This blog post is an all-in, super-detailed account of every part of this entire process. From how this idea came to be, who we worked with, every single design […]

How a common pain point led us deep into the physical product world, from designs and prototypes to a KickStarter launch and everything in between. Pat Flynn February 4, 2019 “There’s got to be a better way.” This is what my videographer Caleb Wojcik and I said to each other 15 months ago—almost in unison—as we observed video creators of all types walking around the VidSummit event in Los Angeles. That thought immediately turned into an idea, which then turned into some drawings, which turned into prototypes, which turned into what is now a new hardware brand that just released its first physical product into the world on Kickstarter last week. Meet the SwitchPod, the first tripod invented specifically for vloggers. This blog post is an all-in, super-detailed account of every part of this entire process. From how this idea came to be, who we worked with, every single design […]

Pat Flynn: Fourteen-ish months later and here we are from idea to launch. I’m so scared. I’m so excited. This is something I’ve never done before. For those of you who don’t know, myself and my videographer, Caleb, we partnered up, we invented an actual physical product. This idea was conceptualized in October of 2017, and it just launched on Kickstarter. This is a big experiment. Some people have called it a big gamble, but Caleb and I are gonna talk about it and everything about it, including how much money we spent in the process so far, what we hope to achieve out of this, where this idea came from, the entire prototyping process, and how we have been marketing this overtime to hopefully have a successful funding campaign. We’ll even answer questions like, well, why are we even funding it on Kickstarter and where is it gonna be […]

In this Campaign Income Report, I’m going to unpack a promotion I ran for someone else’s online course. Here’s how I became one of the top three affiliates and earned five figures in the process without spending any money on ads! Pat Flynn January 28, 2019 Welcome to the first of our new edition of income reports here on SPI! For nearly a decade since the blog was created in October 2008, I’ve been sharing monthly income reports to reveal exactly how my online businesses were performing, including exactly how much money was being made, where it was all coming from, the expenses and the lessons learned that month, too. These income reports, many said, are what put me on the map and what I had become known for, and they were the most popular blog posts on the site. Then, in January 2018, I stopped publishing them. For an […]

Derral Eves: Yeah, I would never rely on one platform because the platforms can change, policies can change, and you’d be trying to scramble to do something next and so . . . Pat Flynn: You’re listening to Derral Eves. He is a YouTube and branding expert, somebody who a lot of people look up to in the YouTube space. He’s actually also the founder of one of my favorite events that I have ever attended, which is called VidSummit, ad this is where I met a lot of people that you’ve heard me talk about on the show before: Roberto Blake, Sean Cannell, and several others. He’s very connected in this space of YouTube, but he’s also more than just a YouTuber, he’s a businessman. He knows how to create businesses and brands that work. He is a producer on the Squatty Potty series with the Harmon brothers—like, not […]

Step behind the scenes of of FlynnCON1: Why I’m doing it, what to expect, and the top five lessons I’ve learned on the journey! Pat Flynn January 21, 2019 For the last six months I’ve been working with Team SPI to create an amazing and unique event experience for people who want to press start (or restart) on their vision for their future. That experience is FlynnCON1—and it happens in my hometown of sunny San Diego this July 26–28. Today, I want to share how FlynnCON1 came about, give you a taste of what to expect at the event, and go over some of the biggest lessons our team has learned while putting together our first ever large-scale in-person event. Why FlynnCON1 Is Happening: The Origin Story I’m incredibly excited to be finally putting together an event like this. It’s not an understatement to say that I’ve been looking forward […]

Matt Gartland: Yeah. It’s tremendously exciting, gratifying, and probably, mostly just a humble moment for me, and certainly for the team. Because as we’ve talked about today, we didn’t necessarily know, I didn’t necessarily know it was going to lead to this tremendous moment, right, but it naturally, I think, led there. You have always been . . . Pat Flynn: You’re listening to one of my team members, Matt Gartland, who I have on the show today, to make a huge announcement with you about the SPI brand, about where I am in business, and about where we are in business. Matt’s been on my team for quite a while. Some of you may not even know what our relationship exactly is, and my relationship with the team is. I’m just going to tell you upfront, right here before we get into it, that up until January 1st, I […]

It takes many hands to keep the SPI ship running. Meet Team Flynn: the full-time team that have officially joined Flynndustries LLC as of January 1st! Pat Flynn January 14, 2019 It takes many hands to keep the SPI ship running. Meet Team Flynn: the full-time team that have officially joined Flynndustries LLC as of January 1! Today on the blog, I’m going to introduce you to each member of Team Flynn—the team that has been helping me these past few years from behind the scenes on the blog, the podcasts, my book projects, all the online courses, overarching strategy (business, creative, and otherwise), and so much more. But today, Team Flynn will no longer be behind the scenes. They’re taking center stage! First though, some context. Smart Passive Income is my baby. It’s the brand and company I built from the ground up more than 10 years ago now. […]

Alex Jimenez: I don’t know even know how to explain it, because it really was such a whirlwind. It was cool to see the opportunities, but again, I don’t think I quite understood the possibility behind it. I thought, “Man, if I can make enough money; a couple of hundred dollars a week or something, where I could just cover the cost of my travel.” Pat Flynn: You are listening to Alex from TravelFashionGirl.com, an amazing friend of mine who I’ve gotten to know very well over the last year. She has a great story about how she almost stumbled upon her niche, which is the travel industry, through a lot of experiences, and problems, and people that she had experienced on her own travels. She built this website and it took off and it became a world wind . . . a world wind? A whirlwind of an opportunity […]

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